Schuster, Lynda

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Schuster, Lynda

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Mozambique.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist. Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, correspondent reporting from Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East.

WRITINGS:

A Burning Hunger: One Family's Struggle against Apartheid, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2004, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Lynda Schuster is the author of A Burning Hunger: One Family's Struggle against Apartheid, a profile of one Soweto family that also encompasses the struggle of the black South African people. The biography traces members of the Mashinini family, particularly Rocks, Tsietsi, Mpho, Dee, and Tshepiso, from the student protest of June 16, 1976, to the 1980s, when the white South African state responded to the uprising. Tsietsi, one of the thirteen children of Joseph and Nomkhitha, was a leader of the movement that protested the rule that all teaching of schoolchildren must be carried out in Afrikaans. Tsietsi and his brothers went into exile. Rocks became a ranking officer in the African National Congress (ANC) and led freedom fighters in the infiltration of South Africa for the purpose of sabotage. Mpho, the most militant, was arrested, tortured, and put on trial for treason, and he went on to found the anti-government Soweto Youth Congress in the 1980s. Dee hoped to become a guerrilla in Tanzania, but he was refused because of his young age. He later worked for the ANC's Radio Freedom. Tsietsi died in exile in 1990, a martyr revered by the world antiapartheid movement. Tshepiso, the most bookish of the brothers, studied at Oxford and eventually became an important member of the Johannesburg council.

An African Business contributor wrote: "If the Mandelas were the generals in the fight for black liberation, the Mashininis were the footsoldiers," and added that A Burning Hunger "will become one of the seminal books about the struggle against apartheid." Library Journal reviewer James Thorsen concluded: "Schuster writes a riveting family history of an infamous time that still has ramifications."